Friday, May 29, 2009

I've so often seen it referred to as "the best" science fiction anthology out there that I had to look it up. A closer look suggests it's mostly selections from Astounding issues edited by John W Campbell, Jr. But good stories. A few points:

I 'm dropping non-fiction from the ToC list below; keeping only fiction. Where I'm aware of online versions of stories, I include the links. My rating is in brackets. Link on story title goes to my post on the story, if there is one. Links on nouns yield more matching fiction.

[novelette] Henry Kuttner & C L Moore's "The Proud Robot" (as by Lewis Padgett) (A); download; Astounding, October 1943; humor: Hilarious story about a robot in love with itself. Touches on some contemporary themes - video use in a way that annoys content owners, DRM (yes - in a 1943 story!), frivolous patents - but in a manner technologically irrelevant to current times (except last issue - patents).

[novelette] A E van Vogt's "Black Destroyer" (A); Astounding, July 1939; download: A practically immortal super-being of an alien world is attacking human visitors & threatens to overrun inhabited galaxy. I found the ending incomprehensible, but it was an interesting read.

[novelette] Isaac Asimov's "Nightfall" (A); download MP3; Astounding, September 1941: On a world with many suns, natives are unexposed to the idea of night & are very afraid of dark are about to face night & nightmares due to eclipse that occurs only once several thousand years.

I personally prefer the corresponding part of its novelization (later half of novel is uninteresting post-apocalypse stuff). I would have ranked this novel part higher in this list.

[novelette] Eric Frank Russell's "Symbiotica" (B); Astounding, October 1943: Travails of inadvertently nasty human adventurers on an alien planet where animal & plant life-forms live in a much closer symbiosis than on earth, & where plants can be very nasty once provoked.

I personally found an earlier version of this story - "See-saw" - a much better read.

[ss] Milton A Rothman's "Heavy Planet" (B) (as by Lee Gregory); download; Astounding, August 1939: A native of a super-high gravity & super-dense atmosphere world has found an invaluable relic of alien origin.

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comments:

I just wanted to send along a couple of observations: several of these stories were made into films/radio plays (and you can find links to them at www.rimworlds.com/theclassicsciencefictionchannel;you can also gain some insight into who the most influential authors of that era were by noting the presence of multiple stories by several authors. These days, it is very unusual to find an anthology that has more than one story per author.

I'll have a look at Rimworlds link. And also link any that are online. Thanks.

"These days, it is very unusual to find an anthology that has more than one story per author.": Yes, I don't see anyone around who can even remotely challenge Kuttner, Moore, or Russell. I'm a fan of Ted Chiang among the modern ones, but he's not very prolific.